In recent weeks there has been a wave of articles in mainstream media such as Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek and Industry Week about up and coming consumer products and the visionary design studios and product development companies that come up with them.  It is mesmerizing to read these articles and browse pictures of the revolutionary products depicted.  It is also mind boggling to see how far and fast technology has evolved in the consumer products, biomedical and Internet connectivity industries.  In the very recent past, as consumers we were desperately looking for the next application or tool that would allow us to bring Internet into our personal lives and homes.  We were used to browsing the Internet at work because the high prices for fast Internet connections were only affordable to the organizations we worked for.  By contrast today we enjoy high quality and high speed Internet for less money than we spend on food and drink.  We are used to laptops with wireless internet capability that allows us to do things such as paying our bills while sipping iced tea and laying back in the hammock hanging from the trees in our backyards.  We enjoy free high speed internet in coffee shops and even roam around downtown in cities that offer their citizens free wireless internet while visiting business on main street.  This furious pace makes it difficult and even scary to think what sort of technology and power we will have at our fingertips in the near future.
There’s one thing that many of these products in these articles have in common.  Many of them have been designed with Pro/ENGINEER.  The Wildfire release of Pro/ENGINEER has been praised by many of the companies designing these products.  The efficiency and functionality in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire has made it possible to achieve product designs that were very difficult to achieve with the tools available to product development companies in the past.  Below are examples of some of these revolutionary consumer products that were designed by companies using Pro/ENGINEER.
Offspring Wearable line of products by Motorola and Frog Design - The fashion and high-tech industries rarely see eye to eye. But if the future of technology is in wearable computers, as some believe, then the Offspring Wearable products are a step in the right direction. One of the products in the Offspring Wearable line is a pair of sunglasses.  These sunglasses don't just look cool; they are also with a small digital camera lens and a heads up display.  It allows you to stay connected to the world around you with wireless Internet capability and a built earphone for you mobile phone.  It's part of a line of products that include wireless PDA that would be worn as a watch or a smart pen that remember what your wrote in its digital memory.
Some of these gadgets were featured in the recent teen spy movie, Agent Cody Banks.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/mgm/cody_banks_2/

Treo by Handspring and Hiptop Devices by Danger – How many pockets do day-to-day pants have?  Sure there are your hunting style pants that come with more pockets than you will ever discover by the time you have worn them out.  But even then, who wants to load down their pants with all the different gadgets that we have gotten used to and many of us now depend on.  We find our lives enhanced by PDA devices allowing us to organize our lives, mobile phones that allow us to communicate no matter what were doing at the time, e-mail devices, web devices, and laptops to name a few.  That’s already four pockets and a backpack.  Treo by Handspring and Hiptop Devices by Danger provide us with one tool that would replace all the above devices.  And they do so without requiring us to squint and a one-inch square mono-color LCD screen.  They are fully equipped with easy to read, high-resolution color displays and keypads that are ergonomic despite their sizes.  And you’ll only need one pocket to carry them in.
 
Epic Frame “ The Holy Grail of Mountain Bikes”
To learn more about this bike and its “brain” technology visit - http://www.it-knows.com/
 
Epic Bike Frame by Specialized and Brain Shock by Fox Racing Shox – The fast pace of life made possible by the advancement in technology and the gadgets we used today, is making it possible and is driving many of us to spend more time outdoors.  Our fast paced brains can only be refreshed by some fast paced outdoor activities like racing down that gnarly hill in our mountain bikes or winning that medal in the local mud bowl.  The mountain bikes we were used to less than a decade ago were nothing more than beefed up road bikes with softer and wider tires.  We were limited on the kind of hills we could conquer unless at the risk of brain damage from all that shaking.  The incredibly light and strong bike frames such as the Epic Bikes from Specialized, equipped with ingenious shock systems such as the Brain Shock by Fox Racing Shox allow us race down hills with mud, rocks and boulders at speeds that we normally drive our cars at.  Just look around you the next time you are on the trails.  You might think the guys on these bikes are nuts, but it doesn’t feel that way for them.
 

The Proof That it works: The above photo is of Filip who won the world championship on a Specilized Epic bike equipped with a FOX Brain. This is the first time in Worldcup history that anyone has won the Worldcup on a full suspension bike.